We Walk the Dust
by Inexplicable Cat
Summary: "When you are unable to die,it's pretty easy to turn you into a heartless,emotionless robot designed only to kill."
1. Prologue

Author's Note: This is an old story of mine that I really hope I will be able to continue writing it. It is a K2 story with minor Creek. Thank you for reading! :)

* * *

They came when I was fourteen.

Forced their way into the middle of the night, breaking into our home, taking me away and depriving me of my life.

And of my innocence.

To this day I haven't found out who informed tthem about me. Maybe some asshole from our little town, that sick bastard Mr. Garrison, or a doctor down at Hell's Pass who had watched it happen more than once.

Me dying I mean.

And sold it out to them.

That's what they wanted. To them, I was priceless. A little boy with the ability to revive.

They told me I should feel lucky for having the privilege to serve my country in such an extraordinary way. Not that they ever gave me a choice to begin with.

My family didn't exactly oppose to me being taken away. Hell, they probably paid that fucking excuse of a parents big time to keep their mouths shut. When they took me they told me that everything was arranged, that they were gonna fake my death, a death I wasn't supposed to come back from.

And so I'd be free to start my new life as a soldier, a patriot, a fucking war machine. Fuck! I didn't even fully comprehend who were these guys that they were ''kidnapping'' me.

The government? (God I sound like Tweek!). The army? CIA? All of them together?

I was so fucking young and confused.

Yet I had experienced enough pain, agony and misery. I was a poor little boy with an alcoholic father and a fucked up mother. For all I knew maybe this was my big chance of getting out of that shithole and making something of myself.

They sure made it look that way to me.

I hadn't really got anything to hold me back there.

Well except for my friends.

….My friend...

That was actually the worst part about the whole situation. That they didn't even give me a chance to say goodbye to them.

To him...

* * *

We traveled for a long time.

They put me in the back of an army vehicle, a soldier next to me and another one in the front seat next to the driver. The guy who had done the talking, who must have been in charge or something, was in another vehicle. I remember staring out of the window at the town I had lived my whole life, as we were going away.

His house was the last thing I saw before closing my eyes and falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.

I was woken up hours later, by the soldier next to me announcing that we had reached our destination. As I climbed out of the vehicle I observed my surroundings.

It was like a scenery taken out from a James Bond movie or something.

A really cold and filled with snow landscape, tall dark trees all around us and in a few feet away an enormous building that looked like something between an army camp, a hospital and a fucking prison.

''It's the Laboratory for Explicit Military Research.'' the soldier informed me.

Yeah, like I could comprehend any of that!

We made our way to the big gates where a man with grey hair waited for us. He told me his name was Dr. Kovak and that he was thrilled to meet me. I couldn't ever fathom anyone to be actually ''thrilled'' to meet me, so I figured he was just being polite and probably he was lying about his name as well.

I was fourteen years old, my mind was full of conspiracy theories, and action movies.

It was still all a big game to me, one in which I had the main role to play. The mysterious man took me inside and said he was going to give me a small tour around the facilities.

There was nothing I could do but watch as the big, metallic, cold doors locked away my childhood.


	2. Chapter 1

Dr. Kovak showed me around the facilities, there were a lot of lab rooms inside the building in which all kinds of experiments took place as he explained to me. He avoided mentioning what **kind** of experiments, but I was soon about to find out.

The hard way...

After visiting a big dining room and a room filled with gym equipments, he guided me to a small ward that was supposed to be **my **room.

There was a metallic bed inside, attached to the wall, and a tiny table, metallic as well. It had a small bathroom too that smelled like antiseptic and iodine. It was so cold, so impersonal, nothing like my old room filled with posters of naked women. I even missed the company of my pet rats!

The doctor suggested that I should get a good night's sleep and with that worthless piece of advice he left, locking the door behind him like I was some kind of a caged animal.

I cried myself to sleep that night.

* * *

The first week was quite. Probably they had the decency to let me adjust to my new environment before taking over my life.

Dr. Kovak, who appeared to be the head of the research team, was a nervous man in his mid fifties with big glasses and messy grey hair. He looked like the average crazy geek scientist, who could analyze you every fucking rule of physics or anatomy but couldn't boil a goddamn egg without getting second degree burns.

He wasn't interested in me except for my abilities, he never tried to approach me on a more personal level despite the fact that our lives interacted for more than seven years.

Every day they would wake me up at exactly 5am, I had only ten minutes to clean myself up and get dressed (they provided me with special uniforms) before a soldier came to escort me to a small room like a kitchen where I could get my breakfast. Hell, at least in the laboratory my diet wasn't consisted solely of frozen waffles and pop-tarts. Actually the only **good** part about being there was the food. They didn't let me have my meals in the main dining room though, probably because they didn't want me to spy on their conversations.

After that it was time for my medical tests.

They took my blood sample, hair sample, even sample of my piss.

They put me inside in weird looking machines trying to analyze my body, my brain...my everything.

They made me run while having a million wires on me, and they made me lift weights to see how much I could handle.

I was still very confused, I knew they were searching for something but I wasn't completely sure what it was.

Dr. Kovak wasn't very enlightening either, he would order me around, to take off my clothes, stay still to take the samples, open my mouth to examine it and other shit like that, but when I tried to ask anything he would look me with a severe expression, informing me that they just wanted to find out how my body worked.

Around 2 pm they would stop and I would have a few hours to rest. I needed the break cause at 5 pm sharp I should be either at the gymnasium or outside the building at a specially formed area resembling an army camp training field or something.

Among other things the field had a obstacle course with climbing walls, nets and hurdles. The schedule differed from physical exercise to military training. The latter was much worse.

My trainer was a young man, around his late thirties, ugly as hell with scars on his face and so mean that sometimes I really thought he was the Devil himself! His name was Reiger.

And when my training started, following my first week there, he would make me do sit ups, push ups while he had his foot on my goddamn back, and when we were outside, he'd make me crawl on the ground only in my boxers, feeling the freezing snow right to my heart, and he'd force me to climb monkey bars that some had shards of glass across them, for chrissake! The purpose was to learn to avoid them but until I could manage that my palms were bloody and injured more often than not.

I had been to hell before but it was nothing compared to that place...

Then one day something happened that made me realize a few things.

I had been in the laboratory for almost a month, apparently they had conducted their researches on me and they had came to their conclusions. I thought that maybe they would leave me alone. You see although that nasty son of a bitch Reiger tortured me every single goddamn day, I actually preferred the training from the peculiar tests they were conducting on my body, I felt like a fucking guinea pig or something.

So when they guided me to a distant room in the laboratory, I immediately could tell that something was off. The room had no machines inside, no instruments to pierce my skin with and I also noticed that it was sound-proof.

That upset me the most.

They left me there alone and I just stood in the middle of the room, waiting.

After a while Dr. Kovak showed up but this time wasn't followed by his usual court, only by a soldier who locked the door behind them and the both of them stood side by side observing me. Then Dr. Kovak gestured to the soldier to proceed with something and a shiver went down my spine as I watched him pull out his gun.

He shot me right in the head.

When I came back, I found out that I was in something like a hospital ward, lying on a kind of a comfortable bed.

They obviously had cleaned me up, and put me in a new, clean uniform. First thing that caught my attention was the sick, kind of creepy, **more** than satisfied smile on Dr. Kovak's face. It was the only time that I remember he showed a tiny hint of emotion.

It scared the hell out of me.

They left me alone for the rest of the day, I didn't even have to get to my training, so I lay in my bed thinking about the current events. I believe I had always known it in a way, that it was **all **they were after for. And I guess it was time to see for themselves.

* * *

Then there were the soldiers. A small platoon that was supposed to protect the lab as well as the experiments and the results. The man in charge was Sergeant J. Huntson.

I'll never forget him for as long as I live...

It was a Friday night.

I had been at the lab for almost two months. It was a full day of experiments and training as always and I had just collapsed into my bed, my body aching from the exercises.

That's when he came.

I was woken up by his grip at my arm as he forced me to get up and follow him. He took me to one of the medical labs. There were three other soldiers there. Huntson closed the door behind him and locked it.

They raped me there, in the middle of the cold floor and when they were done, they made me clean up the blood.

I had had sex before so at least they didn't steal that away from me as well.

When Huntson took me back to my room he kept his hand on my shoulder all the way there, while he was talking to me. He said it was for my own good, he said it was supposed to teach me discipline...

That motherfucking son of a bitch.

After that night, and after my first death there, I came to many conclusions.

First and most important; my life...wasn't **mine** anymore.

No. I belonged to them.

I could have fought, I could have run away, I could have struggled.

What they could do to me, kill me? Huh...

But...I didn't.

I didn't fight, I didn't struggle, I just stayed there in that cold building and endured all the experiments, all the harsh training, all the abuse, the pain and the humiliation.

Why?

I dunno know.

Maybe, maybe deep inside me I thought that was the way things supposed to be, that was what should happen to me.

And second...I realized, that this was **no** game.

No game at all...


	3. Chapter 2

I can't really describe my years at the Lab without being over dramatic about it.

To make a long story short, they were terrible. More than terrible actually.

To tell the truth I don't really consider them as a part of my life, cause, you know...I had **no** life there. I was just a guinea pig to them, a fucking lab mannequin, for them to conduct their bloody experiments.

No pun intended.

If at some point people stop treating you like a human being, like a entity with the spark of life and a soul able to feel inside of you...I guess you just forget it yourself.

And you just exist.

I realized quite early, that the scientists there were working on solving the mystery of my revivals.

They wanted to find out why I kept coming back from the dead, to detect the secret gear in my mechanism that allowed me to be indestructible, undefeatable.

Of course, I couldn't possibly fathom in the beginning, why they were after that, or how they could put it into proper use if they, indeed, found it.

It had been a whole month, after my first death there, when Dr. Kovak decided it was time to try something at me again.

Since that bastard shot me, the scientists were content to just take my blood sample every day and my urine sample once a week.

But when that vacuous asshole came to my ward again, I knew that my days of peace were over.

I was prepared for a bullet through my skull again, but fortunately that was not the case.

Dr. Kovak guided me at one of the lab rooms and instructed me to lie on the bed.

I did so and he pulled this huge syringe, out of his pocket, while all the color, probably, drained from my face.

It was then, the first and last time that he tried to explain what was going on, to decipher the paranoia that was the Laboratory for Explicit Military Research as well as the Project Phoenix, that they had, stupidly, named my case.

I still remember his exact words.

"Kenneth" he said and my birth given name sounded more grave at that point than anything I've ever heard in my entire life "I'm going to inject you with this needle" _I already figured __**that**__ out you moron_!

"As soon as I do that, you 'll feel your body growing numb and after 36 seconds you will lose consciousness. And then...you will pass away. This is a lethal injection, the same used to convicted prisoners on a death row."

Fucking perfect!

"You must realize, that I'm going to do that, not because I want you to suffer in any way or as a punishment, but because we must explore the...potentials of your body, of your whole organism in order to use the results in the best possible way. And the only way to do that, is to study what happens to you when ...well, when you die. Do you understand me, son?"

I tried so hard to find a hint of sympathy in his eyes. Something that would indicate that he was **indeed** struggling for a higher cause and that my sacrifices would mean something.

I found nothing.

Just the determination of a man, who would do anything without reckoning the casualties, to reach his goal.

Higher cause, my ass!

But of course I couldn't do anything, so I just nodded and I observed that creepy smile of his, before he injected me with the needle.

After that it was just darkness.


End file.
